Blogging about

Thinking Allowed

Sport might appear to be all about fair play, but it is also all about winning and losing; and some of the rewards for success are rich indeed. Consequently, there are powerful temptations to bend, or even break, the rules to secure the rich prizes that are available to the winners. To some extent sport makes its own rules, although decision making is increasingly subject to public appraisal and the sponsors of sport and its regulatory bodies must abide by the rules of the wider society. Sport has its own governing bodies that regulate the bodies that take part.

Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable.

Although sport is big business, and constituted by media, sponsorship and commercial networks as well as its practitioners, at all levels, it is also a particular social world, which seems to operate outside the parameters of convention in an uneasy relationship between promoting competition and elite outcomes, at the same time as widening participation and creating greater equality and cohesion. Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable (for some).

Sport is not outside debates about corruption and unfair, even illegal practices, although what is categorised as corruption in sport often centres on revelations of drug abuse and performance enhancement by individual athletes. Doping and match fixing affect the results of sporting events, which undermine the basic principles of sport, and implicate participants, organising bodies and promoters. Ideals of fair play and amateurism underpinned the Olympic movement; the modern Games were based on a movement with stated ideals, some of which seem less relevant today, like the amateur ideal and requirement that athletes be amateurs and not professionals.

Marc Hodler revealled corruption in the International Olympic Committee
[Image from Wikimedia: available under GNU Free Documentation Licence]

The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes

Ideas about democratic participation and fair play remain a powerful part of Olympic rhetoric and governance, although what counts as social exclusion or social inclusion in sport varies according to time and place. These ideals not only seem incompatible with corruption, they also serve to conceal it; rather like white-collar crime. It’s not what convention leads us to expect, whatever the current furore about bankers and politicians, so it passes unnoticed. The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes that precede success in being the host city. As Andrew Jennings has demonstrated, corrupt practices have been rife within the IOC (International Olympic Committee), and came to a head with the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, when Marc Hodler, an IOC member, broke ranks and revealed that agents had been bribed to vote for cities bidding for the right to host the Games. This blew the lid on systematic malpractice within the IOC, and an internal enquiry found clear evidence that up to 20 of the 110 IOC members had been bribed to vote for Salt Lake. It didn’t stop in 2002, though, and there continue to be claims of corruption in the bidding process in the lead-up to 2012. 

The 2012 website may be counting off the days, but news stories also show some of the tensions and difficulties that beset the staging of any such mega sporting event and, indeed, sport in general. Like all sporting activities, the Games involve both winning and losing, success and failure, equalities and inequalities. The Olympic democratic ideals, global reach and wide range of sports and participation mean that the Games lend themselves more powerfully to such a politics of inclusion than most other sports, especially those which are dominated by commercial concerns.

Corruption in the Games, as across sport, can be seen as the outcome of a failure of governance as Sunder Katwala has argued. This failure can be seen in part as dependent upon the inequalities that permeate the organisation of sport, and not the more corporeal inequalities or differences in skill and competence that are displayed on the field. Corruption in sport may be primarily economic and financial but it is also social and cultural and draws on social inequalities that are not entirely dependent on athletic competence.

If some of the lessons learned from critiques of white-collar crime mean drawing attention to the privileges of class, gender and ethnicity that can be obscured by ever growing bureaucratic regulatory bodies, then this concept has some purchase in understanding the slow pace of change in the governance of sport.

Find out more

• OpenLearn: Influences on corporate governance – free learning material from The Open University
• The great Olympic illusion

Further reading

• 'Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating and Regulatory Bodies', by Kath Woodward, Palgrave Macmillan
• 'Dishonored Games: Corruption, Money and Greed at the Olympics', by Viv Simpson and Andrew Jennings, SPI Books (US)

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts

 

Travelling through Delhi is a reminder of the transience of power. From a rickshaw or the new Metro, rapidly becoming one of the largest public transport networks in the world, reminders of various rulers that the city has outlasted flash by; from crumbling walls of Turkish sultanates to the white columns of the British Empire. The layering of history over the some 2600 years that this place has been settled has led to the development of contradictions that Delhi’s residents absorb on a daily basis. And none are more obvious than the division between the north and south of the city, between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Delhi.

In Old Delhi I am penned in on all sides by rickshaws and honking, narrow laneways of bangles, wedding haberdashery, stationary and books, the smells of kebabs, parathas, sweets in clay pots, the smoke from barbeques, and tables piled with calendars and plastic monuments. The sweet seller remembers me from my last visit 18 months ago. He has been there almost every night for as long as he can remember. This is Chandni Chowk, with the mighty, flood-lit Jama Masjid at its heart. Chaotic cables and electricity wires are as entangled overhead as its laneways and knotted communities.

Delhi
[image by wili_hybrid, some rights reserved]

Across the round-about at Delhi Gate is New Delhi, with its Barista and Costa Coffee café chains, hip clubs, neon signs, mega-malls with premium high-street brands at European prices, wider roads, greener spaces and construction sites. Next to the broken walls and parapets of history are other buildings being broken, a new one built, another storey added. Metro and Bus Rapid Transit corridors divert traffic, including almost 300 000 new cars added to the roads in recent years. Traffic is now a constant crawl, giving commuters time to read the billboards that line the flyovers, promising ‘world class lifestyles’ in satellite cities that are green oases on the outskirts of this megalopolis of almost fourteen million. Newspaper advertising highlights the ‘global experience’ of living in these enclaves.

Delhi has followed a pattern of redevelopment that concentrates investment in gentrification enclaves; intensifies state intervention, for example, building new infrastructure and designating others as ‘illegal’; and fragmenting the city into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ terrains, with those areas marked as undeserving also marked for demolition. Boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn and there is the physical removal of those that don’t fit within Delhi’s 2021 Master Plan for urban development.

Edge cities have been created to cater for the flow of transnational corporations and transnational professionals as well as a burgeoning middle class. If you get a call from an Indian call centre chances are they are in Noida or Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. These edge cities are marked by new condominiums, villas, proximity to malls and multiplexes, and facilities such as health, education and leisure centres, crèches, lawns and landscaped gardens, yoga centres and spas, with clearly delineated boundaries and internal homogeneity maintained by gated surrounds.

But there are other types of edge cities being created as well. ‘Cleaning up’ Delhi to achieve global city status required the removal of shanty towns, jhuggis, the closure of small traders, and whole neighbourhoods of what were predominantly resettlement areas of rural migrants and socio-economically marginalised populations being demolished and their inhabitants forced to move to outlying areas of the city.

At this moment in Delhi, a locality, a slum to use the more familiar word, is being surveyed for demolition. This community has ‘illegally’ and organically established itself since 1969 at the crossroads between Old and New Delhi. I have driven past this place dozens of times and not realised that some 15000 people live behind the crowded, jumbled shop-fronts. Officials will ask each household in the locality to prove, via a ration or voter registration card, that they have lived here prior to 1998. If you can prove this, and you can pay Rs 7000 (approx. £100), you can be given a plot of land approximately 12.5 square metres in a new resettlement area called Ghevra; perhaps a larger plot up to 18 square metres if you can prove you lived here before 1990. Your home will be marked with a cross and it will be demolished. You will then have to move your family to Ghevra, live in temporary shelter, under plastic or metal sheeting or thatch, in blistering summers, pouring monsoons and bitterly cold winters, until you can afford to pay for a new home to be built. If you can’t prove you lived in the locality before 1998 then you have no options; you must simply move into another crevice in the city.

Ghevra is some 50km from the city centre and will reportedly become one of the largest resettlement colonies in Asia once the planned demolitions and forced displacements have occurred. During a visit to Ghevra in March 2007, there was little infrastructure in place: water was trucked in, there was yet to be a school built, and latrines were portable, made of metal, shimmering in forty degrees of early summer heat. Most of the inhabitants were unemployed, removed from informal employment networks when they were moved out of the city and away from trading centres such as Old Delhi. Returning on this trip, two years later, little has changed. There are more pucca, brick houses, but there are still thatch shanties and there are still people living in tents waiting for their legal status, their entitlement to a plot of land here, to be sorted out in the never-ending bureaucracy. Most of the houses have metred electricity now and there are cement latrines and washing areas but there is still no running water. Meanwhile, an apartment built for the Commonwealth Games athlete’s village, built on land from which people were displaced, can be bought for Rs 2 crore (£284 000) to Rs 3.5 crore (£497 000). The viewing apartment contains a flat screen television which can be viewed from the bath. Saskia Sassen’s geographies of margins and centres are clearly played out in Delhi in this spatial relegation of those already at the social and economic periphery of the city.

Power is explicit in this process, in both the hegemonic acceptance of a particular aesthetic in urban planning, and, as we are seeing in other cities throughout Asia and Europe, the removal of increasingly invisible people. There is little consultation with those about to be displaced and little debate in the media about the violation of the right to secure housing. There is hope, however, in the creation of new social spaces, including cyberspace, in which dominant political, economic and cultural systems can be challenged by everyday experience and learning processes that can shape interpretations of the environment. Consequently, protest becomes centred on other fragments of the city being no longer able to ignore the presence of its peripheries. The urban landscape of Delhi, marked by the fragility of power in its historical landmarks, is a daily reminder of the possibilities of such new alliances in the city.

Find out more

Slum demolitions in Delhi since the 1990s: An appraisal

'City Transformation and the Global Trope: Indianapolis and Cleveland'
by David Wilson
in Globalisations no. 4

‘Economic Restructuring, Urban Change and Regeneration: the Case of Dublin’
by Michael Punch and P.J. Drudy
in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Vol. 29

Open University courses such as Understanding Cities.

About the author

Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

Subscribe to Melissa Butcher's posts

 

I rarely see films but I had to make an exception for Slumdog Millionaire. There seemed to be too much about it around me for me to partake in my social life without seeing it! It had hit the airwaves big time. Last Sunday the film won Oscars in eight categories, including coveted categories such as Best Film and Best Direction. Images of young members of the cast as they walked out on the red carpet of the award show were displayed in newspapers all over the UK. It was surrounded by the story of the night of British successes at the Oscars, to which Slumdog had clearly contributed. It was a proud night for British films.

The film Slumdog Millionaire was interesting at many levels. It draws on an internationally recognisable brand, the popular quiz show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ The elements of the game show are familiar to many of us and phrases such as ‘phone a friend’ have forever become inscribed with the meaning it holds in the show. As such, the film draws on the international success of an entertainment phenomenon, and the franchising deals that have indeed gone on to help circulate this programme in many countries in the last ten years. Like some of the other popular shows, its national (in this case, British) origins have been subsumed by its international success.

However, unlike the programme, the film is clearly marked as British, drawing its ‘Britishness’ from the nationalities of its producer, director and some of its key actors. The success of the film at the Oscars has been lauded as an achievement of British cinema. Media discussions of the Oscar victory in the British press focused, right from the start, on whether this success is an indicator of the revival of British cinema and how future success at the Oscars for the country can be ensured.

Yet, it is not only the Brits who are making claims to this film. Rather like ‘Obama’ who may be simultaneously claimed by Kenya, the US and Indonesia at a minimum (though the Irish are in on tracing his routes to their land too) Slumdog too can be claimed by many others, most notably by Indians. For many Indians it is an Indian film as every scene is set in India, the narrative delves deep into the miseries of modern life in a Mumbai slum and the storyline is ultimately an unveiling of urban India. Indeed, for Vikas Swarup, the author of the book Q&A, on which the film is based, the story is wholly Indian. In an interview he says ‘I don't want to be branded as a writer catering to Western sensitivity. This is an Indian novel, rooted in Indian tradition, written with Indian idioms. It is an Indian story of Indian characters in the Indian milieu.'  Many of the film's actors, the music and much else draws on Indian people, places, objects, realities. The recognition received by the young actors from the Indian government is testimony to this claim.

Slums in India.
[image © copyright Photos.com]

However, other Indians have betrayed their ownership of the film, not with pride, but by denouncing aspects of the film as not reflecting India properly. An example of the perpetual issue of representation and replication that surrounds film analysis is the way in which the portrayal of Indian poverty, in particular, has troubled many people from/in India. Some see this as a peculiarly British portrayal – a vestigial imperial sentiment, of degradation of what has been lost in the disassembly of Empire. For others, it is not a fair depiction – it glosses over the complexity of life in urban slums. Still others comment on how they felt about this portrayal in the context of being part of a movie-going public in the US or UK. This portrayal of India seems to evoke more shame in British or American theatres, or while going out with British and American friends. These issues of representation and belonging become even more complex when understood as part of the film-going experience.

As I watch the recriminations and the adulations I am wondering what claims to national pride are being performed by the audience alongside those performed by the actors on screen? What exactly is being lost and created in these performances? Whose film is it? Or is its success that it creates either affection or disaffection in those who watch it. It perturbs them and who they are by making them reflect on what they see. Maybe that is why the award should go to…

Find Out More

Want to take your interest in social change further?

Explored the subject of International Development

Why is schooling failing in the new India?

Controversial issues surrounding Slumdog Millionnaire

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

Subscribe to Parvati Raghuram's posts